The central American nation of El Salvador is absolutely going for it when it comes to pioneering the ideology of having a national economy powered by cryptocurrency.
Until the middle of 2021, over 70% of El Salvador’s population was ‘unbanked’, meaning they had absolutely no access at all to any financial system and could not participate in the global economy.
Since becoming the very first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as its national legal tender, the country’s president Nayib Bukele has been demonstrating an extremely enthusiastic interest in the possibilities of cryptocurrency.
Today, Nayib Bukele has taken his pioneering lead a stage further and has ‘bought the dip’, marking him out as not only the leader of the first nation to empower its citizens via a national currency which is global, decentralized and gives access to a totally international marketplace for its citizens, but also as an astute trader too.
Mr Bukele has purchased a further 21 bitcoins, adding to the Central American country’s already-considerable stash of cryptocurrency. This adds another dimension to the country’s move into Bitcoin, that being its ability to buy and store it on a national level, with the President being the only national leader in the world who is able legitimately able to lead the country into investing in Bitcoin as a store of value.
Mr Bukele publicly shared screenshots of the country’s most recent Bitcoin buy yesterday, which cost close to $1 million, noting the significance of the date, time and even the country’s size – which all line up with the 21 million bitcoins that will ever exist. For example, El Salvador has a surface area of 21,000 square kilometers and the purchase was made on the 21st day of a month in the 21st century.
Nations such as El Salvador which take bold steps forward such as this are not only trailblazers for the future of national economies, but they are demonstrating something else very interesting.
El Salvador, which previously was an agrarian nation with a hugely disempowered majority of its citizens, would have a lot to lose by taking a gamble. If a highly advanced modern nation with a developed investment banking and financial services industry and a huge national capital surplus took a small gamble and it did not pay off, it would not be such a big issue but if El Salvador did and it did not pay off, it would have been a national disaster.
Given that this direction is benefiting the entire population and the nation itself as Bitcoin continues to rise in value, who’s next?
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